The present invention relates to a system and method for locating the anterior and posterior commissures (AC and PC) in a three-dimensional image of a human brain. Identification of the AC and PC are critical for operations such as targeting stereotactic and functional neurosurgery, localization, analysis in brain mapping, structure segmentation and labeling neuroradiology. For example, the Talairach atlas and its associated transformations, which have been widely used as a standard by neuroscientists and neurosurgeons to perform spatial normalization, require identification of the mid-sagittal plane (MSP), AC and PC.
Manual identification of the AC and PC from a volumetric neuroradiological image is tedious and inherently results in a degree of variability across analysts, while identification of these structures by known computer image analysis methods is either too computationally time-consuming or produces unreliable results. For these reasons, there is a need for an automated method of AC and PC identification that is simultaneously accurate, robust, and efficient.